Reprap policies

I looked at a couple posts, and i'm still very confused. I am developing some new ideas and i want to make some improvements. I am a student and this can be pretty expensive. i just wanted to know what were the exact policies about selling assembled repraps or reprap based printers (i'm showing a new design pretty soon) to finance my research and development of these ideas. Thanks for the support

It's an open-source community; there pretty much are no "policies." Go hog wild!

I dont know if i understand licensing myself properly, but here is how i get it. The huge portion of reprap is GPL, in which case everyone can *use* it regardless, you can pretty much do anything you like with it, including getting profit over *using* it, but you cant sell the design itself. Additionally still have obligations to:
- give credit
- in case you make any derivatives (changes, tweaks), you have to 1)release them to public, and 2)under same GPL license! (obviously cant take a GPL design and make it proprietary).

Note that the right of *using* something is distinct from the right of *selling* it (e.g. a lease or rental).

You use the design, meaning you can print parts, make printers, sell printers, do w/e of that sort, for a profit or whatever. That means *using* the design, e.g. you used the design in making those objects. The money you charge may reflects the plastic used, your time, your profit, food for your cat, your beer charges, or anything you like, except that you cant charge for the design itself, since it wasnt yours (not proprietary) to start with. Even if you would have a buyer for the design itself, you obviously cant sell it, again its not yours.

And if you make a derivative, you are still kind of using it to make the new one. Which makes you and the result of your work a subject of the same old license, on top of that you have the obligation to make it public because that was behind the motivation of original GPL license. Basically the bottom line reason why the original author released under GPL was to see it further developed by community, i think thats how its meant.

You accumulate community bonus points and sleep better at night when you share your designs openly and early, in true "RepRap spirit".

That's pretty much it.

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-Nudel
Blog with RepRap Comic

You absolutely can sell a product that is licensed as GPL. What you cannot do is restrict the buyer from exercising any of their rights under the GPL - giving away what you sold them, for example, or making their own derivatives. That usually makes it hard to find buyers as there is usually someone else willing to give away their copy. Commercial companies that make money off of GPL licensed code usually do so by selling support contracts.

If you want to restrict commercial use then you can use one of the creative commons licenses with a non-commercial clause. However, unless you patent the idea anyone is free to come along and reverse engineer your design. All the various licensing schemes really only apply to copyrightable designs and objects. Anything that is functional is generally not copyrightable, as I understand it.

You only have to worry about the licence if you are redistributing or modifying the original design files.

You are allowed to use the files however you want.

Also, there is nothing preventing sale or direct profit from the sale of the files in the standard GPL. The only caveat is the files must remain open and free. If somebody want to pay your for it even though it is freely available, that is fine (unless specifically licensed as 'non-commercial' )

You are allowed to sell any physical object you like. Functional physical objects are governed by patents, not copyright/left licences.

If at any point you alter a GNU GPL file, you must make that file freely available.

In reprap context, if you start from scratch (though largely copying an existing design) you can licence your files however you want. People here tend to get irate about copyrighted work, though.

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www.Fablicator.com

I dont know any person that would want to buy a gpl design, and i think that in reality, when somebody would hire me to do a design or anything like that, would 99.99% chance want *exclusive* rights to use that, e.g. by paying me to do something it wouldnt want me to sell that product to 100 other buyers and perhaps the initial buyer competitors. So i myself consider that if i cant provide *exclusivity* and as long as there is 1 single restriction, than i dont really fully "own" that stuff.

The right of property is divided among many other smaller "rights". So property is the addition of all of these rights like:
- use it;
- take in profit from it; e.g. rental and sub-rental;
- sell it;
(etc some more)
and finally,
- oppose 3rd parties any of the above rights to it.

Whats sold as software is not the entire ownership, its sold as one or a few of these smaller rights. When you pay for a piece of software, its said that "you buy the software", but that is not what really happens. You actually buy only the right to make use of that one copy, under restrictive terms. You dont 100% "own" the software because if you would, you would have the right to copy and sell it 1000 times over, limitless. Or to say, you could oppose any others using it. In reality, you may sell that exact copy you received, and only once.Likewise, i interpret things that we are not "owners" of original design that was licensed, we are a kind of "users".

I think i see the distinction in a different place. Sort of speaking, there are lots of differences in semantics about all this.